AUSTIN — It’s been nine years since Dallas filmmaker Shane Carruth came out of nowhere to win the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for his microbudget brainteaser Primer.

Since then, his planned follow-up, A Topiary, got stuck in development and he went ahead and made another Dallas-based head trip, Upstream Color, which played Sundance in January and opening night of the South by Southwest Film Festival on Friday.

If you thought Primer was audacious, wait until you get a load of this. Treating time and space as personal playthings, Carruth, who wrote, directed, stars, scored and co-edited (with Dallas’ David Lowery), weaves an elliptical sci-fi love story that involves grub worms, memory, financial skullduggery, pig farming and Thoreau’s Walden.

Carruth’s visual syntax is about as unique as they come, especially his command of zigzagging chronological structure and subjective sensory experience. The film also boasts plenty of Dallas scenery, including downtown streets, DART trains and the venerable Greenville Avenue music store Good Records.

Carruth’s arrival in Austin was delayed and he was unable to attend Friday’s screening. Upstream Color is scheduled to open in Dallas in April.

Third time around

When last we met Jesse and Celine, the star-crossed lovers played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, they were reuniting in Paris after nine long years. Now they’re in Greece for Before Midnight, an exquisitely observed drama about what happens when a couple faces the cold, hard realities of compromise and conflicting interests. The film played SXSW Saturday night.

“In the first one, they’re just kind of floating through,” Linklater told me Saturday. “At 23, you have no real obligations. They’re both so unattached. In the second one, he’s at work, waiting for a plane. In this one, they’ve made this big leap, but nothing is perfect, even though they’re in this idyllic setting and they’ve gotten so much of what they wanted from this world. You pay for it. There’s no free ride.”

The trilogy has given Linklater opportunity to travel, but as a native Texan he’s still basking in the glow of Bernie, his 2012 East Texas true-crime comedy-drama that was a hit all over the state (including the Magnolia in Dallas, where it set house records).

“It played in towns around Texas where an indie film would never play — Kilgore, Longview, places like that,” he said. “I think a third of our overage came from Texas, which is crazy. But it’s a Texas movie, there’s no doubt about that.”

Before Midnight opens in Dallas in May.

Follow Chris Vognar on Twitter at @chrisvognar

Plan your life

SXSW Film runs through March 16; the music festival is Tuesday through March 17. For information on the event, including registration, visit sxsw.com.

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